Buy Bitshares (BTS)

There is currently no way to buy BTS directly. So the only way to buy BTS is to purchase BTC to use on an exchange, and then switch it to Bitshares.

Step 1: Choose Your Trading Platform

Firstly you will need to decide on your cryptocurrency trading platform and create an account there. The choice of platform isn’t very important as a beginner, what really matters is a trading platform that you are comfortable using..

Choose one of these platforms and complete the follow steps to get started:

Binance

Go to Binance and create a new account if you do not already have one.

Once your account has been confirmed, log in to your Binance account and click on funds at the top right, then “Deposits Withdrawal”.

Select and copy your bitcoin address.

Look in the “Bitcoin” list and click the Bitcoin deposit button. Then a series of numbers appears in the “BTC Deposit Address:” field. You must copy this series for the next step. This is your bitcoin wallet address.

In the Balances page you will to search for Bitcoin in the list. If all goes well, you will find it at the top.

Next click on the option of Bitcoin and then on the next page copy the Deposit Bitcoin (BTC) address, which the set of numbers and letters.

You’re told that you’ll need a trade password, you can create it and then go back to your Balance.

You need this address for the next step.

STEP 2: BUY BTC

The second step is to get your Bitcoin, you can do that at a broker such as BTCdirect .

If you’re buying BTC for the first time from these brokers, you will be asked to confirm your bank account.

Upon payment you will be asked to enter a bitcoin address. You must fill in the address that you have copied at Binance.

STEP 3: WAIT UNTIL YOUR BTC HAS ARRIVED

Once you have purchased Bitcoin and entered the correct BTC deposit address with the payment, you have to wait until the BTC arrives in your wallet.

This process can take up to ½ hour, so don’t worry if it’s not immediately visible on the exchange.

STEP 4: BUY BTS

Once your Bitcoin has arrived at your trading platform, it’s time to buy some BTS.

Binance

Go to the Binance trading exchange (click the top left on exchange and choose Basic) and use the search function within BTC Markets to find the BTS/BTC trade.

Once on the BTS/BTC trade page you can look in the left box marked with Buy BTS. Here you can decide how much BTS you want to buy using your Bitcoin.

If you then press Buy BTS your order will be placed. When the order is filled you will see your number of BTS on the right-hand box or on your balance page.

Enter the Bit-Z homepage and use the search function within BTC Markets to find the option to trade BTS/BTC.

Use search to find the BTS/BTC trade.

Once on the BTS/BTC trading page you can indicate in the left box marked with buy BTS. Here you can decide how much BTS you want to buy.

If you then press Buy BTS, and enter your trade password that you created earlier, your order will be placed. Once the order is filled you will see your number of BTS on the right-hand box or in your balance page.

Congratulations you’re now the proud owner of Bitshares.

What is Bitshares?

After the hacking and subsequent loss of roughly 450 million USD, Dan Larimer understood that exchanges were the weak link in the blockchain.

He developed BitShares as the first decentralized exchange where you can use BitAssets to trade currency in a trustless way.

What makes exchanges the weak link in the blockchain system is the fact that they are centralized. When you buy crypto in an exchange, either with fiat or another cryptocoin, you are essentially buying an IOU towards a future redemption of your coin. You don’t actually own the coin until you withdraw it into your own wallet.

This leaves the possibility open to be exploited very easily.

BitShares is a truly decentralized exchange that is completely on the blockchain. It even has a user friendly wallet that you can name rather than relying on a string of random numbers and letters.

How Does BitShares Work?

BitShares is a peer to peer distributed ledger. It works with a Delegated Proof of Stake protocol.

Working the exchange on a blockchain rather than a central server means that the block transactions need to be verified and agreed upon. The Bitcoin blockchain uses a Proof of Work protocol, so blocks need to be mined, which takes time to verify a block and is expensive.

Bitshares, instead works by voting for delegates or Witnesses, so the validation process is streamlined. A BTS token holder can vote for 120 delegates. The top 101 delegates validate the blocks. The token then pays the delegates for their work.

Not only is this more efficient but it’s also safer since there is no incentive to try to game the system. Since taking down the blockchain will undermine the value of their own tokens.

By using the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), transactions can be done quickly. Though it has yet to be tested, in theory BitShares can handle 100,000 transactions per second compared to Bitcoin’s 5 per second.

Transaction fees will be paid by the BTS token. To bypass the IOU nature of current currency exchanges, BitShares uses BTS tokens as collateral for an exchange. This results in the token being used more as an equity than as an altcoin.

The transaction fees, which will amount to fractions of cents instead of dollars, will be paid by these tokens.

Then there are payments which are done by use of Smartcoins. Since markets are volatile and to get more people using the platform they need to trust the value of it, there are coins tied to fiat that does not fluctuate. For example, there is a bitUSD that is always going to be 1 bitUSD per fiat USD. 1 week, 1 month 1 year from now it will still be 1 bitUSD to 1 fiat USD.

You can invest in the USD, or other Smartcoins like bit EUR, bitGold, etc, and know that it will trade at the same value as other traditional exchanges. This difference makes it very stable compared to other crypto exchanges.

There are also digital assets, called User Issued Assets. These can be literally anything of value, with the value determined by the issuer. Something as small as loyalty points from an issuers rewards cards to property deeds can be registered with a smart contract and placed on the blockchain.

This means incredible liquidity on any assets. Somebody could put up their assets in gold, stocks, property etc and then use it to borrow or exchange for fiat, or other crypto currencies. You could then withdraw that to be able to make payments or put in your mattress if you are so inclined.

What is Bitshares, then, is not such an easy question to answer.

Everything about it is decentralized. The software it uses is open source. In theory anybody can take that software and create their own decentralized blockchain exchange.

Even the way they pay their workers is decentralized. Anybody can propose a project to start on the blockchain and the delegates vote on it. If they get approved, they get paid in tokens to work on their project. The token holders, then are the company.

It started out trying to be a decentralized NYSE sort of crypto exchange, but has morphed into something more utopian than that even.

One thing it isn’t is a currency.

Though they issue their own token, BTS, the token is just for ease of use and to pay it’s witnesses and make payments. The value of BTS of course rises and falls. But, that is the nature of a token. It isn’t mean to be used as a currency. That is what the Smartcoins and User Issued Assets are for. The BTS token is equity or collateral to represent the coins or currency being traded.

Just like in most airplane crashes, user error is almost always the case for crypto currencies getting hacked or stolen. Though it remains to be seen if Bitshares will end up the top dog in the decentralized exchange realm, it definitely has signaled that centralized exchanges can be replaced.

If crypto is going to have a future of an actual currency, then it has to be indeed trustless. If current exchanges continue to erode that trust then we may be seeing more exchanges based off of the example of Bitshares.